You’ll Poke Your I Out!
Intel has a plan to help with their declining market share and it is a doozy. The long standing Core moniker, which dates back to Conroe in 2006, will be no more. As of Meteor Lake you will no longer see products such as Core i5 being sold by Intel, but something completely different. The rumour flying around indicates that the replacement might be Ultra, based on the name associated with an engineering chip spotted on the web. That means you might buy an Intel Ultra 1003H later this year if you are shopping around.
On the one hand this will help the average consumer figure out how old the processor they are buying will be, as for many an 11th Gen Core processor doesn’t mean all that much. We can certainly spot it by the model number, but even then it can be a small challenge to translate. If Intel abandons the Core iX moniker that will certainly make it clear it is a new product, at least for a generation or two until they have to revert to adding a numeral to it.
There could be a small problem which comes with the name change however. Just as there was a generation that associated Pentium and Intel automatically, there is an entire generation of consumer which has only known that Core means Intel. A rebrand to Ultra, or even something less awful, is going to have a significant impact on brand recognition. It will be interesting to see what effect this will have on their sales.
